tanka

tanka--
small songs I sing
to join
my voice to other voices
hidden in the grass

Friday, May 30, 2014

Liturgy of the Hours

My old banjo clock used to run for eight days straight, but now it stops after only a few hours. I carry it to Rick’s Timeshop, where several hundred ticking, tocking voices mark eternity. While Rick peers into the innards behind my clock’s face, one of the cuckoo clocks on the wall chirps out the hour, accompanied, surprisingly, by the sound of water running over stones. Thoreau’s dictum—time is but the stream I go a-fishing in—rises to the surface of my mind.

cuckooscounting out the hoursof my lifeby a babbling brook—I steal a dipperful of silver

The Grass Minstrel

Sometimes
I wake
and before me
the familiar hills rise,
tendered by shadow,
burnished by light,
and for once I see
the high black gloss
of carpenter bees
folding their bodies lovingly
around stamens,
and the last monarchs
on the last asters
open and close
their numinous stiff wings
like the wordless pages
of a book,
and it becomes
for a moment possible
to forgive the world
and its myriad beings
for being
exactly as they are,
and to sing
among the lesser minstrels of the grass
even as the burnish fades
toward winter
and toward night.
............. jwa